Logically, the westerly colonization of North Africa prefaced settlement on the Moroccan shores beyond Tangier, a development strongly backed by the expansionist Hanno. It was, like all enterprise in the far west, a subject of restricted information so far as Carthage's competitors were concerned. Greek ignorance of the sphere confirms the level of trade secrecy. Pindar, writing at the very moment Carthage was investigating the Atlantic shores of Africa and Europe, declared the straits of Gibraltar - the Pillars of Hercules, as the Greeks had it - the limits of the accessible world. Beyond, in Hellenic mythology, lay the Garden of Hesperides where Hercules, winning the golden apples, achieved apotheosis. By the second half of the 5th century, Herodotus had caught word of the beginnings of Moroccan trade: The Carthaginians speak of a part of Libya (Africa) and its people beyond the straits of Gibraltar. On reaching this land they unload their goods and place them on the beach, then they retire to their ships and make signals.
